If you own an Android device and you’re reading this site, chances are that you’re a tech-oriented person and your life involves other gadgets and operating systems, whether it’s a computer running Windows or Mac OS, or an iOS device — iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. While each of these platforms seems to include more proprietary services and apps with every new release, there still is — thankfully — a middle ground where it’s possible to make different devices talk to each other.

It’s this middle ground, and the tricks and apps that make use of it, that we have explored and dug deep into over the past couple of months. Over the course of two different series, we explained how you can use your Android device with a Windows or a Mac computer, as well as how you can keep it in sync with different iOS devices. Here are all the articles grouped together for easy referencing and bookmarking:

I’m relatively new to the joy of podcast listening. Although I’ve been invited to speak on some podcasts before, I never bothered to subscribe or listen to any as I’ve always preferred getting my news through reading. But preferences change and about three months ago, I noticed that I do at least ten hours of driving per week and that time is getting lost on radio shows with countless ads or on music I’m bored of hearing. Those ten hours had to be invested more efficiently and so I found myself tempted by podcasts.

Fast forward three months and I’m addicted to my podcast subscriptions. I’ve gotten used to the voice, the character and the style of every person I listen to, and I now prefer getting most of my news this way. It’s more personal than reading, more raw, and more engaging and interesting.

All of my podcast needs are catered by Pocket Casts — which we reviewed a while ago, before it got its major redesign — and I’ll show you in this post how I make the most of its features to stay on top of my 28 podcast subscriptions.

However, even though the first three parts were great ways of keeping both devices in sync, using iOS and Android together has limitations. In this last part, we’ll look at the various elements that prevent proper sync between the two platforms, lead to frustration due to differences in user experience or problems resulting from the application stores respective to each platform.(more…)

This week we’ll take a more general approach and suggest various applications and services that save your content in the cloud and synchronize it transparently across devices and platforms. Whether you read articles and books on various phones and tablets, or need your notes and tasks sync’ed or simply want to keep track of your expenses across platforms, we’ve got the right apps for you!

Last week we gave you some advice on how to keep your data, email, contacts and calendar perfectly synced between your Android phone or tablet and an iOS device. Although these are essential elements to synchronize between your devices, replicating media from your iPad or iPhone to your Android device — and vice-versa — can also prove very useful.

Indeed, whether you run out of battery, lose your phone or prefer to use a larger screen, you shouldn’t have to worry about manually transferring your content to every single device you have. To make this chore seamless and transparent for you, we’ve selected a handful of apps and tools that will automate the process.

Many of us have devices that run on different operating systems, for example a work iPhone and a personal Android device. Looking at my specific case, I use a Samsung Galaxy Note II as my everyday phone and recently bought an iPad mini, which led me to explore ways of keeping the two in perfect sync.

In an always-connected world, it’s relevant for the two devices to communicate with each other and share data. Most importantly, having your emails, contacts and calendars synchronize from one device to the other is essential. This process should be seamless and transparent to you, so that all your content can be updated on both devices with no hassle. That’s what I will explore in the first part of this series.

Recently Google released its new note-taking solution, Google Keep. The competition in this area is pretty stiff with a lot really great apps that already exist — just off the top of my head, there’s Evernote, Simple Notes, Fetch, and OneNote. With these and more already in the note-taking app space, how does Google Keep measure up? After using it for several weeks in real-world scenarios, here’s what I found out.

All throughout March, our team focused on bringing you the best tutorials for personalizing your Android phone or tablet in our Customization Month. From custom ROMs to wallpapers, we took you through a ride of the best ways to personalize everything about your Android experience, gave you examples for inspiration, and showed you where to look for more sources and content.

However, since those articles are scattered across our repository of posts, and since we had published a lot of customization tutorials and round-ups before March, we decided to put them all together for you in one easy-to-navigate list. This makes it easier to bookmark, share with friends, and come back to when you want a full customization resource.

It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.

One of the new features introduced in Android 4.2 was the ability to add widgets to the lockscreen. For a long time, this feature remained underutilized, with a few apps adding support for it but not many really harnessing its power.

Enter DashClock, a widget that can be added to the lockscreen and offered an open API to allow third-party apps to build extensions for it. DashClock opened a whole world of customization to Android users, as we finally had a customizable widget that didn’t limit us to one app or one notification.

It’s Customization Month on Android.Appstorm! Throughout March, we plan to share with you all our tips, tricks, apps and resources to help you improve your phone or tablet experience and make them suit your style.

Adding a new background image to your home screen is one of the quickest and easiest ways to customize your phone. Just as with your desktop computer, you’ll probably find that you have a number of built-in images to choose from, but in all likelihood you’ll want to choose something a little more personal such as a photo. But if you want something a little different, take a look at MultiPicture Live Wallpaper which brings animation to your backgrounds.